Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Monday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
During Sunday night's presidential debate, Republican Donald Trump called the "inner cities" of the US a "disaster."

"You go into the inner cities and you see there's 45% poverty ... in the inner cities," he said at the debate. "The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent. I've been saying that [in] big speeches ... what do you have to lose? It can't get any worse."

Economists at the real-estate analysis firm Redfin have found, contrary to Trump's alarming message on the destruction of America's urban landscapes, that, based on real-estate prices, the inner cities of the largest metro areas in the country have actually been booming economically.

"Donald Trump mentioned 'inner cities' 10 times in last night's second presidential debate, using words like 'disaster' and 'devastating' to describe them," wrote Nela Richardson, the chief economist at Redfin. "When neighborhoods decay, home prices decrease. However, a look at home prices in the 'inner cities' of most major US metro areas shows that the opposite is happening."

Put another way, if inner cities are crime-ridden disaster zones, no one would want to live there, and home prices would be lagging compared with those in the suburbs. Richardson said the opposite was true of home prices in urban centers compared with the outlying metro areas.

"Instead of falling, the median price per square foot of homes sold in the inner cities of 31 major metro areas has jumped 52% over the last six years, outpacing price growth in the surrounding metro areas by 18 percentage points," the Redfin economist said in the blog post Monday.

Richardson said combining the decrease in crime with the "economic and cultural renaissance" that many downtown areas have undergone had made these desirable places to live.

The notable exception is Chicago, which Trump has used to exemplify his case of urban decay and which is one of only three metro areas that have seen inner-city home prices lag the surrounding metro area (the others are Miami and Houston).

Overall, however, Richardson said the real-estate market pointed to strong, growing inner cities in America rather than the "disaster" trump describes.

"That's not to say that people aren't struggling, but Donald Trump's picture of the urban core doesn't match the real estate market, and he more than anyone should know that when it comes to house prices, it's all about location," Richardson concluded.